One of the best things about spooky season is hanging out on the couch and enjoying the variety of horror-movie programming that emerges from the various catalogs of various movie studios and channels.
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And why shell out for endless rentals and subscriptions when services like PlutoTV and Tubi have plenty of spooky classics from throughout movie history streaming for free?
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(As long as you can stomach the occasional ads, anyway – or, as we refer to them, convenient candy breaks.)
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Tubi in particular has a huge selection of new-ish, classic, and cult movies that shuffle on and off their service regularly.
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It also, like every streaming service, has a bunch of time-wasting junk.
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Thankfully, Decider is here to help you make the most of spooky season ’26 with this countdown of the very best spooky movies currently available to stream for free.
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Happy Halloween streaming – or screaming, as the Crypt Keeper would put it!
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Witchboard (2025)
RATING: R
DIRECTOR: Chuck Russell
CAST: Madison Iseman, Aaron Dominguez, Melanie JarnsonHonor the late, great Chuck Russell, who passed away this year, with his little-seen remake of an ’80s cult item.
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Russell himself was active in the ’80s – he made a rad remake of The Blob from 1988 as well as the acclaimed third Nightmare on Elm Street – but Witchboard plays more like a forgotten and surprisingly good mid-2000s supernatural horror movie.
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Madison Iseman plays a recovering addict whose mental state frays as she forges an unexpected connection to a spirit board that possesses her with visions from its creator.
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Season of the Witch (1972)
RATING: R
DIRECTOR: George Romero
CAST: Jan White, Raymond LaineA few years after he made history with Night of the Living Dead, George Romero fused domestic drama and the occult; the resulting oddity (sometimes titled Hungry Wives or Jack’s Wife) isn’t the scariest thing in his career, but is a fascinating time capsule of its second-wave-feminism era (and accompanying suburban discontent).
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The Ruins (2008)
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RATING: R
DIRECTOR: Carter Smith
CAST: Jena Malone, Jonathan Tucker, Shawn AshmoreScott B. Smith (no relation to the director) adapted his own well-reviewed, bestselling horror novel about carnivorous vines (!) found at a Mayan ruins site.
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Though the movie didn’t reach the same level of acclaim as the book, The Ruins does creepy-crawly plant horror better than the same year’s The Happening, with some visceral visual effects.
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The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
RATING: TV-PG
DIRECTOR: Terence Fisher
CAST: Peter Cushing, Robert Urquhart, Hazel Court, Christopher LeeThe title makes it sound like a later-period entry in Universal’s Frankenstein series that began back in 1932.
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But The Curse of Frankenstein actually kicks off another, unrelated series based on the Mary Shelley classic, loosely adapting that novel in the first Frankenstein movie for Hammer Films.
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It became Hammer’s first big horror movie, ushering in an era of monster movies taking advantage of lurid color and looser content restrictions to deliver vivid red blood and ghastly new experiments and demises for the dead and undead alike.
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This is a different Halloween II, Rob Zombie’s sequel to his own remake, which does pay homage to the hospital setting of the “original” 1981 sequel.
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After that impressive opening, though, Zombie’s second Michael Myers movie goes in a weirder, darker, more creatively bold direction than either his remake or most of the Halloween sequels it followed.
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Audiences largely avoided it, but fans of Zombie’s distinctive work often consider it one of his best.
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Siodmak, one of the great underappreciated directors of his era, went on to make a bunch of terrific noirs and psychological thrillers, including some proto-horror work.
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Son of Dracula came before his peak period, and if his foray into the Universal Monster world isn’t quite up to his later films, it is an entertaining example of his genre versatility.
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The film follows Lon Chaney Jr.’s mysterious, ah, Count Alucard (spell it backwards) as he arrives on a New Orleans plantation, invited by Katherine Caldwell (Louise Allbritton), who may have designs on something only this mystery man can provide.
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It’s more of a potboiler than the elegant original, and Chaney is no Bela Leguosi, but Siodmak’s stylish direction makes Son of Dracula a lot of fun anyway.
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All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006)
RATING: R
DIRECTOR: Jonathan Levine
CAST: Amber Heard, Whitney Able, Michael WelchIt
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’s a measure of how much the horror market has shifted over 20 years that All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, a clever and well-shot slasher movie, somehow wound up in release limbo for a full seven years after its Toronto premiere, at least in the U.S. (some international releases followed a little more quickly).
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It finally came out in 2013, and while it might have been underwhelming after seven years of mystery, now it’s easy enough to watch it and appreciate its evocative cinematography, strong performances (especially from a young Amber Heard), and clever sociological twist.
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Director Jonathan Levine went on to a Hollywood career, directing several Seth Rogen movies and the horror comedy Warm Bodies; he was recently tapped to direct the Tom Cruise sequel Days of Thunder.
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Not very spooky, but his feature debut remains one of his best.
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Fright Night (1985)
RATING: R
DIRECTOR: Tom Holland
CAST: William Ragsdale, Chris Sarandon, Roddy McDowallNo, the director isn’t the Spider-Man who’s married to Zendaya.
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This Tom Holland has horror bona fides: He co-wrote and directed the original Child’s Play, wrote Psycho II, and made this suburbs-set horror movie about a teenage boy who realizes his new neighbor is a vampire – and enlists the help of an only-on-TV vampire hunter to try and stop the creature’s killing spree.
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It’s not the most intense vampire movie you can watch, but it’s one of the most fun, playfully injecting vamp mythology into a culture that presumes familiarity with it already.
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Jordan’s best-known horror movie is Interview with the Vampire.
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But honestly, his other, far lesser-known, female-driven vampire film featuring heavy backstory is the more consistently entertaining of the two.
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It may not have Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise, but Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan are sensational as a mother-daughter pair of vampires forced to relocate to a small coastal town in England, a location that gives way to surprising amounts of gothic atmosphere.
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RATING: R
DIRECTOR: Neil Marshall
CAST: Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex ReidInitially enough of an obscurity that its sequel never even came out in theaters in the U.S., The Descent has grown in reputation over the past 20 years, to the point where it’s now considered one of the best and most intense horror movies of the 2000s.
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It helps that it will freak some viewers out before it even gets to the creature-feature or the gore; scenes of a group of spelunkers exploring cramped underground graves are enough to induce nightmares in anyone with even a hint of claustrophobia.
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On top of that, the mutated bat-people emerge!
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The attempts at trauma-mining setup may be a little hackneyed, but as far as gnarly creature horror goes, it’s hard to beat The Descent.
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Teeth (2007)
RATING: R
DIRECTOR: Mitchell Lichtenstein
CAST: Jess Weixler, John Hensley, Josh Pais
There are, unavoidably, a great many horror movies about vampires, zombies, slashers, and creatures, some of which appear on this very list.
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That’s precisely what this darkly funny indie horror is about, featuring a command performance by Jess Weixler as a teenage girl whose sexual awakening has some bloodier-than-usual results.
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…and 25 more, not listed.
The Aporia
